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WORM’S EYE VIEW:

In England, Now

by Robin Guard

"Who knows England, who only England knows?" asked the poet, which is a neat way of saying that you can’t really appreciate your surroundings until you’ve got something to compare them with. Since we have a daughter living in London, England, we go there fairly often, and I enjoy making comparisons with life in Canada.

Most of these comparisons boil down to population density: England has twice as many people in a little island that could fit into one of our national parks. Yet until comparatively recently, the overcrowding was only oppressive in the big cities, and the countryside was open, magical and breathtakingly beautiful. But every time I visit, I see more of the beauty being lost under the onslaught of development, intensive agriculture and, above all, the car.

The British drive very small cars, but they drive them in great quantities, and very fast. The cars are small because British roads are of two kinds: splendidly engineered Motorways and all lesser roads which, if wider than six feet wide, have a solid wall of parked cars all along one or both sides. The narrower the road, the more it twists and turns, and if you have to drive along one you will immediately find that you have a long line of other cars behind you, all driven by people seriously late for an appointment. I was told that Britain holds the world record for traffic jams; one day last summer the line of cars trying to get into London from the north was backed up for sixty miles.

England has always been the home of eccentrics, if not actual raving loonies, and this is one of its most endearing features. My favorite people are those who work together to preserve the legacy of the past, and of course over there they have a lot more past than we do. Britain led the industrial revolution, with the invention of machines to make cloth and the replacement of human muscle by steam power. And all over the country, people have been restoring the wonders of those amazing days. It seems that half the towns have got some restoration project going on. Hundreds of miles of the old canals have been cleaned up and opened to recreational barges, and all over the country there are little stretches of railway line along which teams of eager volunteers run lovingly restored steam engines. There is also an abundance of thatched cottages, but they all have fitted kitchens, lots of bathrooms, and prices that start at half a million pounds.

One of the most interesting places we visited was called The Lost Gardens of Heligan, which are just outside Mevagissey in Cornwall. If you owned a stately home in the eighteenth century and you were very rich, you could plan a series of gardens that would provide you with all the fruits, vegetables and flowers you could wish for, twelve months of the year. The challenge for the Head Gardener was to be able to "send up to the House" as much exotic and out-of-season produce as possible, and this was done by building walled gardens with greenhouses and hotbeds. The Heligan gardens were "lost", meaning totally reverted to wilderness, until their discovery in 1990 when the difficult job of restoration began. Today the gardens are back to their former glory and are self-sustaining financially because of the crowds of visitors they attract.

I have only my own observation to go on but my impression is that the proportion of people in England who care about organically grown food is about the same as in Canada. But because the population is so much greater, the range of choice is greater. There are many farms supplying city-dwellers on a CSA basis, where you agree to take what the farmer sends you in season. My daughter orders from a huge cooperative which puts out a 20-page catalogue and delivers free anywhere in London, minimum order $35. It would be difficult to think of an organic product they do not offer, and that includes meat, beer and wine. The fresh produce comes from all over Europe.

At the other extreme the supermarkets are unbelievably huge and totally automated. Everything comes plastic wrapped with a bar code, and this even extends to the bedding plants in the adjacent store. I saw a dozen different bagged "composts", none of them bearing a list of ingredients but all "formulated to your needs" and color-coded to match the plant you want to grow: open the package, place it in the ground, add fertilizer with the free plastic scoop and turn your computer-controlled watering system to "Start".

And that just about sums up modern England (and the rest of western Europe as far as I know). Enjoy a wonderful living museum of the days when four out of five of our ancestors lived on the land, and a chilling forecast of our inevitable future: plastic-wrapped, bar-coded and ready for the microwave.

Oh, one more thing about the car problem. The new Prime Minister has just appointed the well-known actress, Glenda Jackson, as Minister of Transport, with the mandate to stop people buying more cars. I told you they were eccentric.

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